Saudi Stays the Course on Defense Spare Parts Industry

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet has signaled the kingdom, the world’s seventh-largest weapons-buyer, is sticking with an effort to build a defense spare-parts industry at home.

The cabinet on Monday night ordered that the kingdom’s various security and defense bodies give preference to the government’s own military-industries agency in buying basic defense goods, ranging from ammunition to spare parts for vehicles.

The cabinet statement, carried by the state press agency, gave word of unspecified new regulations and organizational changes ahead for the country’s small defense industry. Western analysts and insiders in the international defense-trade in the Gulf said they would watch those changes to see how aggressive the Saudi effort to build a domestic defense-industry remains.

Saudi Arabia spent $56.7 billion on weapons in 2012, a 12% increase over 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks international arms buying.

Saudi defense officials in 2012 said the kingdom was aiming for self-sufficiency in terms of spare parts – from silencers to vehicle radiators – for defense and security bodies.

The effort to develop a Saudi defense industry is most associated with the late Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who died in 2011, and son Prince Khalid bin Sultan, removed as deputy defense minister earlier this spring. The Ministry of Interior remains as one of the stronger advocates of buying Saudi goods for defense and security needs.

Military analysts said the quality of spare parts produced domestically, as well as Saudi business interests that profit from the international arms business in the kingdom, have been two limiting factors.

Gulf states in general are making a push toward greater military autonomy, both through domestic investment and through partnerships between foreign defense firms and local companies.

“But what they want and what is possible are very different things,” one analyst said.